Alix Nathan Bücher

The last Eve saw of her mother was a wave from the basket of a rising balloon. A wilful, lonely orphan in the house of her erratic artist guardian, Eve struggles to retain the image of her missing mother and the father she never knew. In a London beset by pageantry, incipient riot and the fear of Napoleonic invasion, Eve must grow into a young woman with no one to guide her through its perils. Far away, in a Norfolk fishing village, the Rev Snead preaches hellfire and damnation to his impoverished parishioners and oppressed wife. Snead illustrates his sermons with the example of a mute woman pulled from the sea, over whom he keeps a very close watch indeed.

A Sunday Times fiction book of the year'She is an original, with a virtuoso touch' - Hilary Mantel'An extraordinary, quite brilliant book' - C. J. Sansom'A powerful and unsettling novel' - Andrew TaylorThe year is 1793 and Herbert Powyss is set on making his name as a scientist. Determined to study the effects of prolonged solitude on another human being, he advertises for someone willing to live in his cellar for seven years in return for a generous financial reward. The only man to apply is John Warlow, a semi-literate farm labourer with a wife and six children to support. Cut off from nature, Warlow soon begins losing his grip on sanity while, above ground, Powyss rapidly becomes obsessed with Warlow's wife, Hannah. The experiment, a classic Enlightenment exercise gone more than a little mad, will have unforeseen consequences for all included. In this seductive tale of self-delusion and obsession, Alix Nathan has created an utterly transporting historical novel which is both elegant and unforgettably sinister.One of 2019's most high-profile hardback publications, now out in paperback. Featured on Radio Four's Book at BedtimeBBC History Magazine Best Historical Fiction of 2019

Born in her father's coffee house in Change Alley, London, Sarah Battle is raised in a smoke-thick atmosphere of coffee and alcohol. Witnessing and suffering from the destruction of the Gordon Riots in 1780, she longs to escape her surroundings into a better life. Her first attempt is via marriage to a man who's not what she thinks he is. Her second sees her in the new, promising, democratic world of late 1790s Philadelphia where she experiences deep love and warm friendship. Meanwhile, not far from Battle's, lives Joseph Young, a highly talented, depressive engraver who picks up Lucy, a girl he finds collapsed in a doorway. Their fraught life, with its connection to an extreme, revolutionary group, contrasts with the joy of Sarah's brief stay in America. The two stories weave together and eventually merge in a final exhilarating and dangerous journey, during which Sarah's vision of both past and future reveals the direction of a new life. The Flight of Sarah Battle is set in the turbulent last decade of the 18th century in a London where riot constantly rumbles and Bartholomew Fair entertains, and Philadelphia, where new building, hope and a democracy not quite fully-fledged are shadowed by the terrible threat of yellow fever.